Off to the stars but down to earth

BY RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN

raffy.boudjikanian@transcontinental.ca

The small green and blue orb that is the Earth spun far below Dave Williams in space, fragile and beautiful. "The whole history of the human race has taken place beneath me," the Beaconsfield-native astronaut thought last August as he contemplated the globe from high above. The quiet experience left him with a renewed understanding of just how small the world is, and how important it is to take care of it.

Recounting that experience was one of the few completely serious moments of Williams' speech Thursday night in Pointe Claire's city council room, where a packed audience resorted to sitting on the floor due to a lack of chairs. Williams' energy and sense of humour were in high evidence.

"All I did was answer an ad in a newspaper," said Williams, explaining how he was chosen by the Canadian Space Agency in 1992. "Of course it helped that most of the other respondents were kids," he joked.

A veteran of two space flights, one aboard the shuttle Columbia in 1998 and another on Endeavour last year, Williams said he had thought of being an astronaut since childhood, but shelved his dream for the longest time when he realized the likelihood of Canadians flying to space was not large. Many people laughed at him when he told them of his dream at first, he said, so he simply stopped telling them about it.

"I thought he was crazy (upon first hearing he was going to space)," said Gary Malcom, director of Pointe Claire's Malcom Knox Aquatic Centre, who knew Williams as a teenager when he was a supervisor at the swimming pool and Williams was a lifeguard.

"I don't ever remember him verbalizing it at the time," said Malcom, recalling however that Williams always had a certain sense of adventure.

Though some would say that sense of adventure has led him to do some rather dangerous things, Williams explained his astronaut training has always kept him from panicking during his two space flights, even when mainstream media made much fuss about a destroyed tile on the Endeavour last year. "We were not really overly concerned with it," he explained, adding it was a piece of tile roughly the size of someone's hand.

"I guess I always thought he was going to be successful," said Karen, who did not want her full name used. A former Beaconsfield resident who used to live two doors away from Williams as a young girl, she said she would frequently go over to the Williams home to play with dolls with his two sisters. "His mother was a lovely lady, an excellent homemaker," she recalled.

Williams now serves as the director of the medical robotics program at McMaster University in Hamilton. He said he has great hopes for the Canadian space program in the future, and was confident that somewhere out there, right now, is a Canadian child who will likely be among the first humans to set foot on Mars.